Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And
I'm still woe.
On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing psychologizing sin.
We're going to focus mostly on addiction today, which is a subject
that was recommended by a listener.
Before we begin, a warning to parents, we'll definitely be covering some
adult issues that would be unsuitable for younger children, so you have
to decide whether this is something you want your kids to hear.
We know a lot of parents listen with their kids and that's
awesome, but some of this is definitely gonna be a bit too
old for certain younger people.
The reason that this subject resonated with us when it was recommended
is that the problem of addiction, which is itself to some degree
a psychological and a medical evaluation of was effectively sin, you know
It kind of goes right down the middle of a number of
different problems that we have as Christians living in the world talking
about everything.
On one hand, there is the overwhelming pattern in modern life, and
I'm guilty of it too, of using way too much psychological talk
to speak like a psychologist when describing other people's behavior, you know,
to attribute their actions or their motivations, is that you can see
inside their psyche, which is another psychological term or you know, philosophical
term, and you know what they're doing because you know something about
them that maybe they don't even know about themselves.
And while that's possible to some extent for some people, in general
it's a bad habit because you're not taking things at face value
that if you just did you would have a better understanding than
if you tried to read into it like crazy.
And so there is this circumstance where the general discourse just average
people are talking like they're psychologists or psychiatrists.
And it generates a lot of noise that just leads to silly
conclusions. It ends up making it in a lot of cases more
difficult to actually talk about what's going on.
So one part of this, the minor part is maybe talk like
that less often, try to break yourself of the habit of thinking
about it, things like that.
Because psychological terms, the notion of inner motivations and processes and
you know, hormones, you know, things like dopamine that we'll talk about
in a little bit, in the sense that all these things are
describing problems, they're perfectly fine.
In essence, psychology originally was a science.
It's a soft science, like economics, so it's describing reality, but it's
describing a fuzzy reality.
It's not like math.
It's not something that has absolutes.
There's things in psychology where it's, you know, it could go one
way or the other.
You can try to describe something, but you're still not gonna be
100%. That's perfectly fine.
It's working.
That's why it's called a soft science.
But fundamentally, it's describing how people behave, how people think, how we
feel, how we operate, what motivates us, what causes us to act
or not to act, everything.
Everything about the human life from the moment you get out of
bed until you go back to bed, like it's all of it
will fall to some extent under the lens of psychological evaluation, just
in terms of trying to understand.
Like you don't ever have to think about any of this stuff
and you can be a perfectly healthy person.
And this is one of the reasons that it really struck me
when the subject was raised is that I realized that 200 years
ago, literally no one talked this way because none of the stuff
had been invented yet.
And so that bothers me kind of on principle.
Like, how did Christians, how did anyone talk about being a human
before you know Jewish psychology and psychiatry was invented to tell us
how we basically operate like automatons, which is another thing we'll get
into later.
And so it kind of bugged me.
I want to sort of find a way of talking about these
things that isn't completely bound up in this modern thing, just because
people worked fine before.
Like we had all these problems, we just didn't necessarily have words
for 'em.
You know, so before clinical depression existed, people were just melancholy.
It was describing basically the same thing.
And it was with the same care in some cases, but like
that guy's just Melancock.
You know, typically as a girl.
That's more of a feminine thing, but it was understood that these
things existed going back to antiquity and psychology came along and sort
of systematized some of it, which is valuable.
The problem is that because the origins of psychology and then psychiatry
are almost exclusively atheistic and largely Jewish in origin, they're coming at
all these problems from the perspective that there is no God.
You know, we are evolved from monkeys to we're just these me
robots that are doing stuff and we have programming and we have
these habits as we have brains and we have all these things
that keep us going.
And so for the atheist who is approaching these things scientifically, absent
God, everything becomes mechanistic to a degree.
And that's where the real problem comes in with this approach to
evaluating life.
As soon as you shift from the descriptive form of, okay, well,
you know, someone had something bad happen, and so they tend to
be sensitive about it.
That's descriptive.
When it becomes explanatory and you try to reach in deeper and
attribute to them that, you know, this person is permanently damaged, something
about them has changed forever and nothing can ever fix it, that's
just who they are now.
As soon as it is elevated to identity and to have explanatory
power, you've opened the door to excluding morality from the conversation.
Because if someone was okay and then something bad happened to them
and they had some change, you know, psychological change, and it's a
permanent change or it's a change you want to deal with, but
they're kind of stuck with it, and maybe they struggle against it.
They don't want to do it, all that conversation about someone who's
struggling with something is going to be in terms of the explanation
for why they're doing it without any regard to the morality.
And that's why this is a Christian concern.
Because the outer limit of this conversation, the key part to remember
is that all human action is either godly or it's sinful.
Those are the only two options.
That's the only binary that for Christians it should be our principal
focus when we're looking at things.
Everything should be filtered through that lens.
Is what I'm doing godly or is it sinful?
And then working back from there, if you find that someone is
giving you an excuse, like you're doing this thing, you know, you're
addicted to something, but it's not really your fault because of biology,
because of trauma.
The because of is a license to then sin.
Say, well, it's not really sin.
That person, they're stuck with it.
They're a victim.
No, it's still sin.
It's just a complicated problem.
As we've said in many past episodes, one of the chief dangers
of sin itself is that it breaks things to the point that
it can't necessarily all be fixed.
You can choose or can have things done to you that will
permanently alter the trajectory of your life.
And if it's a sin and you realize it and you repent
and you're forgiven for it, and you can step away as much
as possible from whatever evil you were doing, you may still have
permanent consequences.
The silly example, if you chop off your arm and then you
repent of defiling your body, your arm's not going to grow back.
God will forgive you for harming yourself, but you don't get a
new arm.
You're stuck with what you've done.
So there are certain aspects of this stuff that psychology will say,
okay, well, this has changed and we just have to sort of
deal with the outcomes, but they omit deliberately, because again, this is
an atheistic science in some regards, they will omit that God is
present and therefore morality never comes into it.
And that's a real danger.
It's not so much of people talking psychological terms as annoying, although
it kind of is, and you end up sounding silly and not
making a lot of sense most of the time.
But But the more we get into that habit, and really a
lot of this episode is about habits, the harder it is to
then bring morality back into the conversation.
Because if it's all just habitual, if you just do this stuff
because of trauma or because of biology or addiction or whatever, if
you're a victim, if you're down in it and you can't help
yourself, then you're absolved.
You don't need God to forgive you because you're act you're the
victim. You're not the actor doing bad things.
you're the victim of some bad thing just having floated from the
sky. And that's the true danger, is that people will get into
a state of habitual sin and then pretend that victimhood is an
excuse from moral culpability.
And as Christians, we have to draw the line there.
So we're taking this subject from the approach of morality always has
to be a factor.
And because it is necessary as Christians to be sympathetic to the
fact that these bad things do happen to people, sometimes, you know,
some people are subjected to things that they had no intention of
being participants in and it changes them in ways that then lead
to sin in some portion of their life.
That actually happens.
It does not excuse the sin that flows from it, but it
does explain how they got into that position, why they're doing this
instead of something else.
And so while I don't want to encourage people to be more
have a greater affinity for this psychologizing or thinking about things in
psychological terms, and there's kind of two different things, but it's psychologizing
is when you know armture guys like me.
I'm not trained and I don't care, but sometimes I do apply
the principles that I think I understand.
That's really the problem.
When people think they understand something they don't, you start saying idiotic
things that don't really apply.
So it's a trap to get into that.
But more importantly, you start drawing lines that make it impossible to
talk like a Christian, which again, 200 years ago, nobody talked like
this. We would talk about things in different terms, even though we
were talking about the same things.
But the modern approach of saying, okay, I now know the cause,
I have the explanation for why you're doing this, then it becomes
a disease or it becomes a disorder or becomes something you're a
victim of.
And so you don't have to you know, changing is maybe going
to be good for you.
It's gonna be a positive outcome, but it's not a question of
you stopping sinning.
And that's really the crucial thing.
We have to understand that as Christians, we can't save ourselves.
Again, and we always say this because we're frequently accused of it.
And it's so absurd.
We will never say stop sinning and obey God so that you
can be saved.
We say stop sinning as much as you can and obey God
because you were saved.
God has done these things for you.
He's forgiven all these terrible sins.
When you know that as a Christian, the Christian reaction is to
say, Hey, Lord have mercy and to fall into the arms of
the gospel and to love the law, to say, okay, the God
who has created me, who's created a world where when I sin,
when I do these harmful things, everything gets worse.
I want to live a better life.
I want to live a life without these sins.
And God's word tells me how to do it.
So when we talk about behave, stop sinning all the stuff, you
can't possibly save yourself by doing that.
But because you are saved, because God loves you, he has told
you both in your heart and in creation and in scripture, this
is harming you or this is good for you.
And as Christians, we're supposed to be there for each other to
encourage each other and to help each other.
Because again, some of these things, when people get into these holes,
when they get into these situations, whether through their own sin or
through the sin of others, it takes people helping.
It actually takes someone else intervening.
And that should be the foremost duty of a Christian to be
able to understand what's actually going on
so that we treat it as though there's sin occurring and the
fact that there's harm is the proof that there's sin, but you
still have to deal with what's right in front of you.
And that may mean that you can't just lecture someone morally.
You may have to help them.
You may have to do something that is inconvenient to you so
that they can step away from whatever's hurting them.
And part of that is understanding that while repentance is a decision
to say I turn away from my own evil in my past,
it's also going to be a process.
There will be things where you decide I'm gonna stop doing this,
and particularly in the cases of things that we'd now describe as
addiction, there's a pattern, and breaking that pattern is usually not going
to be instantaneous.
In case of some addictions, chemical addictions, it can actually kill you
if you quit certain drugs cold turkey.
So even in the act of repenting and saying, I turn away
from this evil, I want to stop this sin.
You know, in the case of someone taking methadone to get off
heroin, you're still taking drugs.
But you're not any longer taking drugs to get high.
You're taking drugs to stop getting high.
And so even though the behavior is similar in one small sense,
you were no longer participating in sin.
You're actively fleeing from it.
In other cases, you slip back into something and do something you
wanted to stop.
For Christians to understand these things in spiritual terms and in Christian
terms and in psychological terms is very helpful.
It's actually beneficial, which is why I think that not disregarding the
science of it is so crucial is that to help someone who's
in trouble is you being God's hand in their life.
And that's going to take more than just lecturing them.
It's going to take actually understanding keeping are some of the mechanisms,
here are some of the underlying reasons, but it doesn't explain to
the extent that well this guy's just stuck being a sinner, he
can never stop doing that.
That's not Christian.
It may be hard.
It will absolutely require God's support and help in his prayer and
your prayer as a friend.
But it requires you to acknowledge that the more we sin in
our lives, the more complicated we make things, and often
the more difficult it is just unwind it.
Sometimes repentance is not a single step.
You can easily get so deep into something that you have to
unravel a whole bunch of stuff.
And other episodes we've talked about how that's the case with all
of our civilization.
We could solve any one of these problems, and there are going
to be thirty more equally dire problems that also have to be
solved. It is not an excuse not to solve any of 'em.
It's an acknowledgement that when a civilization goes off the rails, when
an individual's life goes off the rails through sin, the accumulated harm
from that takes a while to fix.
And as Christians, we can never say, you know, go and sin
no more, you know, be fed and warm and just be happy.
Like, no, it's you're gonna struggle.
And as Christians, we have to acknowledge that so we can actually
help each
other. In
a number of previous episodes, the issue of the nature of man
with regard to division into parts has come up, and subsequent to
those discussions, I've had a number of people ask me a fair
number at this point, to expand on why I believe man is
tripartite instead of simply bipartite, which is to say man has three
parts instead of just two.
Because in philosophy you typically have historical discussions and still ongoing today
regarding the division of man into body and mind usually, and then
in theology you usually have discussions of the division of man into
body and soul.
I believe that there are three parts to man.
Now I'm not saying you necessarily have to believe this.
I'm saying I believe it is correct and I believe it is
a useful way to look at man.
But you are not bound to believe this.
It is not sin to disagree with me on this point.
And so man is body, mind, and soul.
Sometimes, historically, and in some contexts, you'll see someone say spirit instead
of soul.
I typically try to avoid that one because some people use spirit
to mean mind, and some people use spirit to mean soul, so
that one can be a little confusing.
Twy I prefer to say body, mind, and soul.
The problem that we have and that we're discussing in this episode
is partly that scientists, atheistic scientists, I mean when I say that,
and others in some of these fields focus only on the body
and the mind.
Now setting aside the fact that there's a very real problem for
them of what is the mind?
How do you have this immaterial thing in a purely materialistic universe?
But they focus solely on those things, and so they wind up
looking at man as being mechanistic, as being essentially an automaton, a
robot. On the other hand, you have Christians who will look at
these things and they typically won't bother with the tripartite division so
they'll focus completely on the soul.
Well, if you do that, you've effectively become a Gnostic.
Because what you're doing is you're denying the reality of the flesh.
If you don't look at the fact that man has these different
parts, you are going to approach these things in a way that
is not going to be beneficial.
Because with regard to the atheist, he is going to ignore the
spiritual aspect.
He's going to ignore these things are sins.
He's going to ignore why these things are even occurring.
The fact that we're fallen, the fact that we have these proclivities,
the fact that original sin gives us this tendency toward these behaviors.
And on the other hand, if you're looking at the Christian side
of things, they're going to ignore that many of these also have
biological foundations.
There are parts of our biology that feed into many of these
problems. If you don't look at man as being this Gestalt, something
that is greater than the sum of its parts, and then looking
at the parts themselves, you are going to miss something, inevitably you
are going to miss something.
And so essentially, the breakdown is that the body is your biology,
and so there are biological bases for some of these things.
For instance, addiction.
If you are addicted to alcohol, you have created in your biology
an addiction to ethanol.
And in fact that is one of the addictions that if you
quit cold turkey it will kill you.
In many cases, won't always kill you.
But that's not how you quit using alcohol.
You have to wean yourself off of that because if you go
cold turkey, you are probably going to induce an emergency with regard
to your biology than there is, with regard to the mind, the
second part of man, psychology.
Psychology primarily attempts to address how the mind works, what the mind
does, how it interacts with the biology, because of course those two
are very closely linked.
Your biology and your mind are incredibly closely linked to the point
where we almost can't disentangle the two.
But of course the same can be said with regard to the
mind and the soul, which I'll get to in a minute.
But certain parts, certain subsets of the field of psychology deal in
large part with the biological seat of the mind, which is the
brain, which is your neurochemistry.
Because we know there are certain things we can do to the
brain that change not necessarily the mind itself, but how the mind
is able to express itself in reality.
And so if certain parts of the brain are damaged, it can
change your behavior, it can change your personality.
If certain parts of the brain are destroyed, it can change your
capabilities at least At least until neuroplasticity allows the brain to compensate
for that to some degree, not perfectly, of course, it's never good
to lose any portion of your brain.
But the mind is a part of who and what you are,
and so it is necessary
to have some field, some undertaking to understand that, and we call
that psychology.
That is the study of the mind.
Yes, of course, again, to repeat myself and to emphasize it, today
we have a lot of study into the neurochemical processes, into the
actual biological foundation of these things, within the field of psychology Part
of that is just because now we have the machinery and things
where we can actually test these things.
We didn't have functional MRIs in years past.
Now we can actually look into the brain and see what it's
doing, particularly when you are, say, formulating certain thoughts or you were
viewing certain stimuli, that's very useful to the field of psychology.
And then third, the third part of man, we have the soul.
Well, that's religion, that's Christianity.
You need that as well to address these problems.
Because if you simply address man as being biology and then somehow
that produces a mind, again ignoring the problem of making that leap.
You haven't looked at the totality.
You haven't looked at the whole of the situation because why do
we do these things?
Why do we have these proclivities?
Why are we inclined toward sin, toward these destructive behaviors?
Biology does not provide sufficient reasons.
Religion does.
Christianity gives you the answers to those questions, and it is also
part of the solution to these problems.
So if you have an addiction, it is necessary to approach it
with all three of these in mind.
An addiction is not generally something that you are going to solve
purely biologically, purely psychologically, or purely spiritually.
And so those who simply tell you will stop sinning are doing
you a very real disservice if they don't recognize that certain sins
do also have either a biological basis or a biological consequence.
Because for some sins, if you if you engage them at least
over a long period of time.
Actually some sins it can be instantly, for instance, heroin.
But generally speaking, if you engage in certain sins over a long
period of time, you are going to create a reinforcing mechanism biologically
that gives you a predisposition toward that, even if you didn't have
it originally, which you may very well.
That is another aspect of this.
There are genetic predispositions in certain populations to certain kinds of sins.
That is simply a reality of the fallen world in which we
live, and we've gone over this in previous episodes with regard to
biology, with regard to race, and things like that.
If you are part of a population that has a genetic predisposition
to a certain sort of sin, you should be more careful in
avoiding that Then would be someone in a population without that genetic
predisposition. One of the most obvious examples would be the Amerindians.
The Amerindians have a reputation of being alcoholics.
Part of the reason that they have a proclivity toward that particular
kind of sin is that they lack the same level of an
enzyme that breaks down alcohol, that breaks down ethanol, when compared to
European populations.
We have more of it.
And so if you drink the same amount of alcohol as a
European, you are not going to have the problem with alcoholism that
an Amerindian would at the same level of consumption.
Because his body is not going to break it down in the
same way that yours does.
Of course there are also differences across gender.
Men break down alcohol more readily and in greater volumes than women.
These are biological differences, and they play into
that addiction, potentially, we call alcoholism.
Now there are of course psychological aspects to that, because for many
it is going to be a coping mechanism.
And saying that something is a coping mechanism is not psychologizing, it
is not using psychology to explain away the sin, because something can
be simultaneously a sin
And a psychological condition.
So for instance, if you take heroin, you are going to create
a biological dependence on that drug, in most cases, the first time
you do it.
So incidentally, do not do heroin.
This is not something where you say, oh, I'm going to experiment
with you can't experiment with certain things.
Because you will be addicted immediately.
Incidentally, caffeine is the same way, but the caffeine addiction is nowhere
near as destructive as a heroin addiction, and unlike heroin, caffeine actually
has legitimate uses.
But you are going to create that biological basis for that addiction,
partly because the system already exists, because if you didn't have the
receptors for the drug, you couldn't become addicted.
But using the drug reinforces that.
You become addicted immediately.
And then there's the psychological aspect.
Because psychologically speaking, you are going to enjoy using the drug.
If heroin didn't feel good, no one would do it.
The problem is that it does feel good.
It's also extremely destructive.
It will destroy your life and everyone around you.
That's the problem with sin.
As we've mentioned many times before.
If sin weren't enjoyable in some sense, no one would do it.
Because ultimately it is incredibly destructive.
It has to have some sort of perceived positive it brings along
with it, or no one would be enticed.
If Satan just came up to you and said, Hey, you should
chop off your foot, very few men are going to say, That
sounds like a great plan.
But if instead Satan says, Hey, you should drink a gallon of
soda every day.
Well guess what?
You wind up losing your feet just the same.
But there is that perceived positive that comes along with it because
you probably enjoy drinking the soda, if you're the sort of person
who likes really sugary beverages, which most human beings do Beings do.
That's how sin works.
There has to be that positive, that perceived at least positive that
comes along with it.
But psychologically speaking, what you've done is you've now created what starts
out in many cases as a habit, obviously heroin doesn't start as
a habit, it starts out as an addiction, but it starts out
as either an addiction or a habit, and it eventually, once you've
lost control of it, which again in some cases happens immediately, it
becomes an addiction, psychologically speaking.
Well now you have biology and psychology at play with regard to
this addiction.
And spiritually speaking, it's a little different, but at the same time
it's not.
Because what is it going to do?
It is going to become an idol, is essentially what you're dealing
with when you're dealing with an addiction.
Now it's sort of a minor idol.
You're not really looking to it for all good in your life,
but you're looking to it for some good in your life, because
this has become the thing you turn to in order to feel
good about your life, in order to maybe feel like you have
control, or feel like something is going right, although really you're making
it worse, but there is a spiritual aspect to addiction.
This is the reason, again, that those who are atheistic in their
views Jews cannot truly treat addiction because they always ignore one of
the aspects of it.
There is a spiritual aspect to addiction.
But if you as a Christian ignore the biology and the psychology,
you are not doing yourself or the other person any good, because
what you're doing is you're telling him just stop sinning.
Has that ever worked in all of history?
The answer is no, because you have to have some sort of
concrete steps in order to stop engaging in the sin, regardless of
what the sin happens to be.
If, for instance, it happens to be drugs, then you should probably
put some safeguards in place where you are not exposed to those
drugs, where you don't have the opportunity to acquire them.
That is a concrete step to avoid engaging in that sin.
And so biologically, physically you are preventing yourself from being in a
position to engage in the sin, psychologically you are putting up barriers
to defend yourself against engaging in that behavior, and then that is
what is enabling you not to not to sin, not to commit
the spiritual transgression.
All three parts of man are involved in these things.
And one of the examples and the reason that Woe gave the
parental warning in the opening one of the best examples is pornography,
because it is so rampant in our society, unfortunately, and very little
is being done to combat it.
It plays on a number of systems in the brain, but we'll
simplify for the sake of the episode because we're not doing a
biology or psychology podcast, neurochemistry.
It basically plays on the dopamine system, which is the reward system
in your brain.
And simplified, how the reward system in your brain works is that
when you do something that your biology likes, it releases dopamine.
And the dopamine is a feedback loop so that you will do
it again.
It's a reward.
It feels good, you do it again, because generally speaking, that is
how we respond.
It's definitely how animals work, and in so far as we are
creatures, we are biological, we are mammals.
We are animals.
It's just that we are more than that because again we are
tripartite. And so what happens is you do this thing, your brain
gives you a reward, and now you want to do it more.
Because you have that biology telling you this was good, here's a
drug, and that's what dopamine is, it's a drug.
Not all drugs are bad.
Dopamine is fine if it's doing its actual duty, if it's doing
the thing it should be doing in the body.
And then psychologically
you have a proclivity toward this now because you had that reward
and your mind goes, I want more of that.
This is a good thing because I got a reward when I
did it.
Pornography is hijacking the system that is supposed to help you pairbond
with your wife, and I'm just going to speak in terms of
being a man because overwhelmingly this is a male addiction, and I'm
male and I'm speaking to mostly men.
This is a system that is supposed to be used to help
you pair bond with your wife.
Because sex gives you a reward.
It releases a number of neurochemicals.
Obviously, it's not just dopamine.
You've also got serotonin and oxytocin involved, other things like that.
But the reward system that is dopamine gives you that reward when
you have sex.
Because biologically your body wants you to do that again.
Partly, this is how God built in a reward for doing the
thing you are supposed to do in marriage.
Do remember that God told us to be fruitful and multiply, and
you can't really do that unless you have sex with your wife.
So it's partly a reward for doing that thing you are supposed
to do.
And in that context, it's good.
Because it builds that relationship with your wife.
Which is what it should be doing.
But pornography hijacks that you're not building a relationship with your computer,
at least I hope you aren't.
But that's what it gets you to think, because it's building on
that system in your biology, in your brain, to get you to
have the same reaction, the same sort of feedback loop, viewing this
horrible material that you would actually interacting with your wife.
There are a number of points here that are vitally important.
One is that this system is part of God's design in your
brain. It is part of God's design of your biology.
You cannot get rid of it.
You will never be 100% the master of it.
It is something that is to some degree out of your control.
Similar to how you will never be 100% the master of hunger.
You can You can suppress it while you're fasting, you can suppress
it in order to lose weight, but it will still be there,
it will still nag it you, and it will get stronger over
time. There are certain things built into your biology over which you
cannot exercise one hundred percent control.
Because to believe that you have perfect control over your biology would
be Gnosticism.
It would be denying the reality of the flesh and saying no,
it's the mind or it's the soul that's completely in control, it's
not the biology.
Now, you are to discipline your body.
But that is because there is a proper outlet for these things
with regard to hunger.
You eat good food
in reasonable portions.
With regard to this reward system, insofar as sex is concerned, you
have sex with your wife.
You're supposed to do that.
The system is working as it should when you use it in
that way.
But again, pornography hijacks it and that is how it works.
So you can't completely suppress that drive.
Because as a man, you are always going to enjoy seeing naked
women. Unless you are given the gift of celibacy, and you probably
aren't. I highly doubt there's a single man listening to this podcast
who has been given that gift.
And if he is, I don't know why he's listening to this
particular episode or at least this section of it.
So it's something that is going to be with you your entire
life. Because it has a legitimate purpose.
It was designed by God to serve a legitimate end.
It is just that sin hijacks it and uses it toward wicked
ends. That's the spiritual aspect of this.
Because that's a sin, we all know that.
Viewing pornography is a sin.
Having the inclination to view it is also a sin, because we
have that only due to original sin.
That is part of our fallen nature.
In a state of perfection, you would not have that inclination because
your only sexual desire would be towards your wife.
And that is perfectly legitimate, that is a good thing that is
from God.
You should embrace that and focus on that.
And incidentally, that is the cure that Scripture gives.
Let each man have his own wife.
That is the cure for sexual sin according to the Word of
God. But with regard to this addiction, which is what viewing pornography
becomes for so many men these days, you can't address that addiction
without addressing all of the parts of that problem.
Biologically speaking, it's going to depend on how long you have been
viewing it, and how frequently.
Because the longer you do that, the more it is going to
affect you.
It actually decreases the gray matter in your brain, it rearranges connectivity
in the frontal lobe.
There are all sorts of things that it does.
It obviously impacts your dopamine system.
It actually causes some resistance to dopamine.
It requires a greater dose of dopamine for you to feel anything
when you've been engaging in this behavior for too long.
Various things like that.
We're not getting into necessarily all of the biology right now.
It's not the point of the episode
But biologically speaking, it alters your brain.
And so you have to account for that in how you address
the sin.
Because you have created, by your own actions,
a feedback system, a feedback loop, in which you are now more
biologically addicted to this thing than you were at the beginning.
And so biologically, you have a problem.
It's not just psychological, it's not just spiritual.
There is a biological basis to it now.
That has to be addressed as well.
Unfortunately in this case, the best way to address that is simply
to stop.
But you have to stop and hold to that for a period
of time, because your brain has to repair itself from the damage
that you have caused.
Psychologically, we have some better tools because psychologically it's not just hey
you have to stop and then hope for the best over a
period of time.
Psychologically, what you can do is remove the things that create that
temptation. You can avoid the things that cause you to fall into
that sin.
And so for every man it's going to be different because there
are going to be different temptations.
There'll be some similarities, of course, across men, but it's going to
be specific.
And so maybe you need to have your computer in a public
part of your house, so that you don't have that temptation where
you are alone with this thing that facilitates your sin.
Or maybe you should restrict your internet usage between certain hours.
There are all sorts of steps you can take that will help
you psychologically.
Maybe when you have that temptation, you go to 50 push-ups or
whatever it happens to be, run a mile.
These are sorts of behavioral approaches.
We're almost talking about cognitive behavioral therapy here, but there's sorts of
approaches here, psychologically, where you can use the same sort of psychological
systems that were hijacked in order to get you to engage in
this behavior and continue engaging in it To diminish the engagement and
form a positive habit instead, which is really what you're doing.
You're trying to form a new habit to replace this old habit,
which is a point I want to emphasize here.
If you have a negative habit, generally speaking, you are going to
have more success replacing it with a positive habit than simply trying
to get rid of the negative habit.
It is more effective to create a replacement
than simply attempt to suppress or destroy the old habit you no
longer want.
Which is what you are trying to do when you create a
new set of incentives or circumstances that will have you doing something
other than the sin.
And again, so every man it's going to be different.
But spiritually, the third aspect of this, because again man is tripartite,
it is sin.
You need to confess the sin.
It may be, and in many cases it definitely is, that confessing
the sin to another man is going to be beneficial.
That doesn't have to be your pastor.
Maybe it isn't your pastor, because these days many pastors are questionable
we'll say, without getting too deeply into that topic here.
It is certainly not going to be your wife.
And I want every man listening to understand that.
If you decide that the wise thing to do, and it's not,
but if you decide that the wise thing to do is to
confess this sin to your wife, You are going to destroy your
marriage. At the very least, you are going to harm it.
This is something that you confess to a male friend whom you
truly trust.
This is something you confess to another Christian man who is going
to hold you accountable.
This is the reason that we need to have male Christian friends,
one of the reasons.
It's not the only reason obviously, but it's one of the reasons.
Because we are to confess our sins one to another.
But that's a matter of wisdom.
You need to know to whom to confess that sin, and it's
going to be again another man who can help hold you accountable.
And one of the ways that you can create that sort of
accountability is that if you fall back into the sin, you tell
him. And he'll chastise you for it, encourage you to stop, and
that's part of it, encouraging each other to avoid these things, helping
each other to avoid the circumstances that create the temptation to fall
back into that sin.
I'm not saying that any of this is going to be easy,
because obviously, for some men, it's going to be very difficult.
Different men are tempted to different things.
Not every man is an alcoholic.
Not every man is addicted to pornography.
The difference, of course, in the case of pornography is that every
man again enjoys seeing naked women.
Not every man actually enjoys alcohol, some don't like it at all,
and some have no inclination whatsoever toward being addicted to it.
Each man is going to be tempted
in different ways toward different things.
And so
the takeaway from understanding man and man's nature as a tripartite being,
is that you need to address all three.
If you address only one aspect, you're handicapping yourself, you're hobbling yourself.
You are setting yourself up for failure by not addressing the totality
of the problem.
If you address only part of a problem, you probably aren't going
to solve it, because really what you're effectively doing is you're addressing
symptoms in many cases instead of the root cause.
If you have a leak in your house, let's say you have
a leak in your roof or a leaky pipe in your crawl
space, whatever it happens to be, and instead of fixing the leak,
you just keep repairing the ceiling?
You haven't really made things better.
Sure, you've probably stopped the water temporarily from dripping on your head,
but you haven't addressed the actual problem.
And so if you focus only on the biology, you haven't really
addressed the addiction.
The same thing is true of focusing on the psychology which is
so common today, or in the case of many Christians, focusing only
on the spiritual aspect.
You have to focus on all three.
You can't deny the reality of the flesh.
You can't deny the reality of quite frankly psychology because psychology is
real. We know that.
One of the things that can be used to test a worldview
is its predictive power.
Many things that have come out of psychology have very strong predictive
powers. They're true.
They have been proven time and time again, they have been tested.
When we say that it can be dangerous, and you don't want
to go overboard, we're talking about psychologizing, which is what those who
deny the reality of the soul do.
Because they say that everything is just biology in the mind.
And so just leave the soul aside.
It's not a sin.
It's because of this, that, and the other.
But we know as Christians that we have a soul.
We know as Christians, that the spiritual itself is also real, and
so that has to be addressed along with the other two.
And so again, what we're really doing in this episode is we're
saying that there is a via media.
As we have said in so many other episodes, we are recommending
that you fall off neither side of the horse.
Because if you fall off the left or the right side of
the horse, in either case you've fallen off the horse.
That's not what you should do.
It may be that falling off one side is worse than the
other. I've mentioned before as an example, maybe there's a cliff on
one side.
If you just psychologize, that's probably worse because you're denying that man
has a soul.
In that case, you're basically an atheist.
That doesn't mean that it's good to deny the biology and the
psychology by making everything spiritual, because then you're spiritualizing, which is falling
off the other side of the horse.
That is also bad.
Recognize that all three of these things are part of man, they're
all three in play with regard to addiction, and they all three
need to be addressed, because otherwise, you are approaching it with an
incomplete solution that will probably wind up making things worse.
If you think about these things from the perspective of Satan the
Tempter, it makes perfect sense that he would target
a part of the human body, you know, dopamine receptors, some aspect
of your biology that God put there for a good reason and
for our pleasure and enjoyment.
Satan's going to target that thing that's going to feel good as
a mechanism so that he doesn't simply have to convince you mentally,
oh, here's a good idea.
Like Corey said, you're not going to conclude even with suggestion that
you should chop off your own foot, but you will conclude that
two liters of Coke taste pretty good and you keep drinking 'em
and a long enough timeline, you get diabetes and you lose your
feet. So the temptation comes by applying a misdirection.
The evil outcome the Satan ones is for you to engage in
sin and ultimately essentially to make your belly your own God.
This is something that Scripture says explicitly.
Philippians three says, Brothers join in imitating me and keep your eyes
on those who walk according to the example you have in us.
For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell
you, even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ,
their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and they glory
in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.
But our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await our
Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ who will transform our lowly body to
be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even
to subject all things
to himself.
When it is written their God is their belly, it's specifically talking
about the seed of physical desires and appetites.
It's talking about these mechanisms.
As Corey said, you get hungry.
God made you to get hungry.
He made you to hunger for good things.
What's Satan gonna do?
He's not gonna try to convince you not to be hungry.
He's gonna take that thing that you've been given as a gift
and weaponize it.
It's Aikido, it's judo, it's misdirecting the momentum of one side to
redirect it to do something else.
That's where the power of evil temptation comes from.
It's not by trying to get you to do a 180.
That doesn't work on most people.
It's trying to just get you to maybe accelerate into the thing
that you already want to do and then move you off course.
So that as Corey said, you have a natural desire for the
female body, but then it is disordered because it's not for your
wife. And if you don't have a wife, you have a real
problem because you have a natural desire without an outlet.
And so Satan uses what God has made for good for evil
purposes, and we let him.
Because we're greedy, we're impatient, we would rather have the pleasure of
eating too much of consuming substances that, you know, maybe they can
be good for us, but in access they're not.
We're doing actively evil things because we want to cheat.
We want to cut in line.
We're not going to wait to get married.
We're not going to have sex with our wife.
We're going to do something else because we want our fix now.
The fix, the biological satisfaction, the psychological satisfaction that we get from
doing something that would have been good if it were done in
the proper context, when we get greedy, when we get envious of
what someone else has, we just want more, more, more.
When we make our god our belly, we're engaging in idolatry.
That's really what this boils down to.
It becomes idolatry to substitute even something that's good, that's given for
a good purpose, and then to effectively bow down to it.
You make your God your belly when you make yourself subject to
your own appetites, whatever they are.
And it could be a good appetite.
You know, it's I've said before, I don't have any physical appetites
for anything for which there's a psychological category or a sin.
I don't suffer from alcoholism or anything like that, but you put
sugar in front of me and I'm gonna consume all of it.
I don't go down the candy aisle because I don't want the
temptation. I know if I bring it home, it's not just I'm
gonna eat it.
I'm gonna eat it all in one sitting.
I bring home two pounds of gummy bears, tarbo gummy bears, I'm
gonna eat 'em all.
That's bad.
So my self control in the face of that temptation is to
leave it at the store, not to buy it.
Or if I occasionally enjoy it, I do it once in a
while, knowing that even if I go overboard a little bit, it's
gonna be months before I do it again.
I don't know to what extent I'm indulging in sin and to
what extent I'm just sort of metering out my lack of self-control,
but I have I have to at least have a conscious choice.
I'm not gonna go down that aisle.
I'm not gonna buy that thing because I know I don't have
the self-control to leave it alone.
That's what I struggle with, and there's not a name for that.
Like there's no disorder, it's just being greedy for sugar.
But I know personally that that is my weakness.
Other people find sugar repellent.
They don't even like the taste of sweets.
I think that's kind of crazy.
Part of the reason for talking about these distinctions in psychological terms
is acknowledging the fact that we are different.
We all have the same basic set of appetites, the same basic
set of potential sins that we're going to commit.
None of us are doing anything original, but we do fall into
different buckets.
I've said in the past, like my sins, my particular sins, probably
not yours.
I'm tempted by things that you were not tempted by.
The reason for acknowledging that is that if I say, well, I'm
not tempted by this, so I'm I'm better than you, like crap,
no. I'm tempted by things that you find laughably non-tempting.
I can't try to one up myself and or one up you
and say, look how much better I am.
That's nonsense.
I'm weak to things that wouldn't even register for you, and maybe
the vice versa is true.
That's what's essential for us as Christians to understand about each other,
is that my weakness is not going to necessarily be your weakness,
but we do have the same propensity for weakness.
And I think that's one of the valuable things about acknowledging not
only from the spiritual side, the sin problem, the fact that we
will tend towards sin, but also the psychological elements.
Because when you begin to break down the differences among men, it's
possible then to become sympathetic even to someone who has a problem
that you don't have at all.
You know, another example from psychology that some people will laugh at,
some people take seriously.
I think it's a useful tool, like all this stuff.
The Myers Briggs text.
I'm not recommending it, but Corey and I are both I and
TJs, rapidly so.
And that is a very particular approach, a mental approach, a psychological
approach to life, to problem solving, to everything that happens.
This is very much an INTJ podcast.
And you don't have to know anything about that or care.
It doesn't matter.
I'm not suggesting you care.
I bring it up because there is a certain explanatory power to
the Myers Briggs description of personalities.
There's certainly some degree of malleability to the way Myers Briggs breaks
down some of the personality types.
And although it originated with Jung, who is absolutely despicable human being,
it really rearranges the way he approached things in a fundamentally different
way. Again, I'm not recommending you take it.
I am bringing it up because Corey and I are so very
specifically INTJ-like that if you were to read those descriptions, like that's
exactly what those guys are like.
In it's in a mutable property of who we are as men.
When you read so there's I N T J and then there's
E S F would be the alternate, their four parts with two
possibilities for each of them.
As an INTJ, when I read the ESFP description, I find it
to be nightmarish.
I am looking at the description of the most crazy insane person
beyond imagining for me.
But I the reason that I think it's valuable to have that
awareness is that they're not a bad person.
I'm not morally condemning them.
The reason that it's valuable is I look at that like, well,
okay, this is a different type of person.
This is a person that's going to approach different problems in different
ways that I find completely alien, that I for me would be
completely distasteful.
But if someone else is out there doing that thing and there
are a lot of them, they're more of them than me, I
can't hate them.
I can't think that they're retarded or dumb or immoral or they're
not defective, but they're different.
And I think that that's another valuable thing that we can we
can learn from psychology is that the acknowledgement of something is completely
obvious. Like obviously people are different.
When these things were systematized, it made it more clear that there
are certain subgroups of people that are going to approach life in
different ways.
And when I learned about it, I was thankful because it made
me more sympathetic to someone that I find alien.
Before I knew about that, I would have just thought these people
are crazy and retarded.
Like I said, when I read the description, it's horrifying.
But then when I see the people in reality, they're not horrifying.
They're strange to me.
Some of their approaches and their conclusions, like how did you get
there? But when I realize it, it's a different approach to the
very same set of facts that's in front of me and they
reach different conclusions, I can't get angry at them.
I can't condemn them.
I think as a Christian, then just as a person who wants
to try to be right, that has value of its own.
So realizing that different people have different problems, have different approaches makes
us more sympathetic to people who are different than us.
You know, some people will listen to 15 minutes of this podcast,
and because we talk and think like I and TJs, they want
nothing to do with it.
I honestly think that a big part of that is a serious
mismatch and that personality type.
And so it doesn't bother me.
I don't think they're stupid or wrong or dumb for not enjoying
our approach, 'cause it's very particular.
And some people find it very appealing, and other people find it
alien and gross and stupid and pointless.
Even if they agree with us, they don't want to hear us
talking about things.
That makes sense from the perspective of those different personality types.
To understand that there are different types of people.
You know, we've talked in the past about there are different races
of people that do things differently.
I am very English with a strong dose of German, even though
that's minority in my part.
Italians are alien to me.
Greeks are alien.
Russians are alien.
And Russians and Italians are alien in a very different way from
each other.
That's genetic, it's not just cultural.
It doesn't mean they're bad.
I don't think Italians are terrible or Russians are monsters.
I think they're different than me.
And I think it's important for us to all acknowledge that there
are different types of people.
The worst thing that we could do to the world is try
to make everyone the same.
I guess one of the worst things about the outcome of mass
media is that because America has been in the lead for the
last century of exporting our culture to the world, it's created a
monoculture everywhere else where everyone eats the same things, drinks the same
things, talks and thinks in the same way, even in their own
languages, listens to the same music, same TV shows.
I think that's a terrible outcome for humanity because it's destroying the
distinctions that made all these other races and cultures and places so
interesting on their own.
I find it very fascinating the approach that, for example, the Russian
mind takes to things.
I think it's fascinating that Russians think we're retarded for smiling.
They think you must be either insane or retarded to smile.
That's how Russians view other people.
Whereas as an American, I'm I'm fine with smiling.
It's my nature not to be grumpy or dour, as unreasonable as
that may seem to some people.
It's a very different distinction.
So I find it fascinating that a Russian would process everything he
takes in completely differently than me.
See, this isn't necessarily about sin, but it can become about sin
if I decide, well, these Russians are acting weird.
They're sketchy.
They never smile.
I don't like them.
I want to hurt 'em.
Like, okay, we've caused a problem.
You can acknowledge that they're different without hating them.
And frankly, it's a big part of the race question for every
race. For the races that we think have serious problems, I'm not
going to hold those races to standards that they can't meet.
There are things that they can do that I can't do, there
are things that I can do that they can't do.
For me to hold them to my standards when we're not talking
about morality just doesn't make any sense.
There are things that I take as an approach intellectually and emotionally
as an INTJ that someone who's different than that substantially
is gonna find it off-putting and strange and think I'm cruel.
You know, artlessly analytical is like is a mastermind is the name
that it's given it.
All the names are s aggrandizing.
I'm not saying anything nice about myself.
Like some people think that MBTI is effectively horoscopes for men.
And to some degree maybe it is.
I would think that if not for the fact that it was
so so embarrassingly accurate about me.
Like I'm not at all unique.
That was also part of the relief of discovering now.
Like, okay, well, I'm not alone.
There are other guys who think the way I think.
That was actually nice to discover.
And to understand sort of the mechanisms.
I think the the reason that I do find a certain appeal
to psychology as a science, as a discipline, is it has this
sort of explanatory power.
Both when we're talking about, you know, mechanisms of addiction, which lead
to sin, and just mechanisms of habit, mechanisms of intellectual and emotional
processing of whatever's coming in.
And it's important to have different types of people.
I would hate a world where everyone was like me in terms
of being an INTJ or anything else.
Like I said before, like one of me is plenty.
People who are different are going to register differently.
And that's often enjoyable.
Like I like talking to people who are different.
In a lot of ways, because I can learn something.
There's not a lot to learn from people who are exactly like
you, who agree with everything you think.
You can enjoy their company and you can have a familiarity and
a camaraderie with them that you're deprived in situations where people are
very different, but you're not necessarily going to learn a lot.
You can learn a lot from people very similar, but it can
be in very minute ways.
The things you're going to learn from people who are very different
are going to be broad strokes, things you never even imagined were
possible. And then you discover that someone with the polar opposite personality
of you can exist and be a nice guy.
Like, okay, I had no idea that was possible.
And so in a way, some of this is kind of a
celebration of diversity.
There's so many things that are left coded today, things that we
consider to be you know, just just Lib Tard stuff.
It's stuff that we're dismissive of from the right.
We think that it's wishy washy and dumb because a lot of
it has been really poisoned.
Like when we're talking about psychology and we're talking about addiction and
the way that the post-God world, when these atheists thought that they
killed God and then replaced him with these new mechanistic approaches to
things, they're left with a horrifying world where people don't really have
agency, where robots
producing programmatically output based on our type.
And I don't think that at all.
I think that the diversity that we've been given is a gift
from God, the fact that we're created in different ways, the fact
that the English are created different from the Germans are created different
from the Russians is a blessing.
And it's good to have all of those people.
But when they come together, they're probably gonna butt heads because it's
alien to a degree.
And not everyone is going to be able to be sufficiently sympathetic
to sort of tease out, okay, well, I understand why this guy
is different because you know this backstory.
At most, sometimes all we can do is just acknowledge there's a
different kind of guy.
I'm not going to be too hard on him because I just
don't get it.
I don't know where he's coming from.
That's another important aspect of this.
Simply acknowledging that there are different kinds of people in And that
you don't have to be a radical leftist liberal to sympathize with
that, to cut people slack.
There are cases that come up for me fairly often where some
Someone who I've known for a while, for whom I have a
great deal of respect.
If they're going through a hard time, the things that I would
normally say to them to maybe correct errors or misstatements or whatever,
I try to shut it down as much as possible.
Give them room.
I'm not going to step on their toes because I know that
they're having a hard time.
And for me to say the things I would usually say would
just make their life worse.
One of the valuable aspects of treating psychological evaluation of others
properly is to have that sort of sympathy, to actually identify, here's
this other guy who is feeling and thinking something different than me
right now?
Do I go at him?
Do I correct him?
Do I whatever I would normally do?
Do I do my usual thing?
As a Christian, that's valuable to know, especially for friends, or really
for anyone.
If you know someone, you know they're having a hard time, back
off. Don't double down on the thing that's gonna give them grief.
Maybe the only thing you can do right now is just listen
to them and let them vent and you know, if they said
something dumb, next month they can come up and you can talk
about it when they're not hurting.
Yeah, it's interesting there was a an empathy test that was going
around last week on X, and Corey and I both got a
couple of the highest scores of anyone that I saw, which is
hilarious because we seem like some of the least empathetic guys possible,
where we can actually feel what other people feel as they feel
those things.
That's really what empathy is.
To put yourself in someone's shoes is to hurt with them, not
to simply say, Yeah, that I see you're in trouble, I'm gonna
leave you alone, but actually feel pain with them.
It's both a psychological term and it's a spiritual gift or it's
a blessing and a curse depending.
But I just find it very conspicuous that of all the guys
who would think that we're totally unappathetic on a neutral evaluation, we
actually scored pretty high.
And that's in part because of introspection.
To actually want to understand other people Is gonna hurt.
If you're willing to put yourself in their shoes, you're gonna feel
their pain.
It's a liberal thing to say, but it's not wrong.
I mean, I feel your pain is literally expressing empathy.
I hurt with you to weep when someone is weeping because they've
lost someone, it's not a weakness.
There are degrees and like you know, some of that's like a
Russian's not gonna weep when an Italian would.
So there are those distinctions, but it's not a complete flaw as
a man to respond in pain with someone for no reason other
than that you're there and you care for them.
As Christians, we can't just write all of this stuff off as
either completely liberal or that's all psychology or psychiatry.
I want nothing to do with it.
There's Christian stuff here.
And it's unfortunate that it's been originated by and then ruined by
some of the worst people in the world.
Because when you look objectively at the descriptive power that has, it
makes us better Christians.
To actually understand, they're guys who process things completely different than me.
So I'm gonna cut 'em some slips.
That made me a better Christian.
I'm not going to get angry or annoyed or dismissive of someone
when I understand that's why they're doing that.
Now, there are plenty of other reasons why I'll still think someone's
retarded, but just because they're processing things differently isn't gonna be one
of 'em.
And I think it's delightful to actually discover someone like that who's
processing the same things as me in a very different way because
when they get different answers, I can look at that and learn
something. They're gonna see something that I didn't see because there's that
widely divergent parallax.
I have perspective here.
They have a perspective half a mile down the road, we're gonna
see the thing very differently.
And so when I hear what they think, I've learned about the
same thing that we're both looking at.
As someone who's curious, I think that's a great thing.
And to realize that those differences are in some cases pretty intrinsic
makes it possible for me to step back, not name call and
not dismiss and say, okay, w from your perspective, what do you
see? This isn't stupid.
This isn't a leftist.
This is it's intelligent and it's Christian.
And I'm thankful to find that there are places where we can
be both at the same
time.
An aspect of this that we've sort of danced around in this
episode but not stated explicitly thus far
is that as Christians we are commanded, you can think of Colossians
three, to bear with one another and part of that is recognizing
that these differences do exist, and that sometimes these differences are going
to play out in terms of different proclivities with regard to sin.
Different men are going to be tempted in different ways.
And indeed men and women are going to be tempted in different
ways. Perhaps so it doesn't feel like we're just beating up on
men with the pornography issue.
Women are going to be
tempted to engage in behavior that elicits attention, and men generally are
not. Now of course that's not universally true with regard to either
sex, because there are going to be men who engage in attention
seeking behavior, and there are going to be some women who do
not want attention.
But by and large, seeking attention, and in this case it is
attention that you should not be seeking, is something that is particular
to the female sex.
Just as pornography is particular to the male sex.
There are women who look at pornography, there are men who are
attention seeking, but by and large there is a skew in one
direction or the other with regard to those sins.
Some men are going to be tempted to overindulge with alcohol.
Some men are going to be tempted to overindulge with nicotine.
If you are smoking multiple packs a day, you've gone overboard.
I'm not going to say that all smoking is necessarily morally impermissible.
Neither of us is going to go that far.
But there is a certain level where once you cross it, it
has become an addiction.
And there's a psychological aspect to that, and there's a biological aspect
to that, and there's a spiritual aspect to that.
Part of bearing with one another is recognizing that these differences exist,
and part of the Christian life is not just avoiding sin for
ourselves, it is also helping our brothers and sisters to avoid sin
as well.
Scripture says that temptations will come, but woe to the one by
whom they come.
It is sin to cause others to fall into temptation.
And so for instance, one of the most common instances of this
that we see in the modern world is women dressing inappropriately.
If you are a woman, and you are going out and wearing
revealing clothing, causing your brothers to fall into sin You are sinning
yourself. It is a very real thing that causing temptation is
itself sin.
That doesn't mean that every behavior that could potentially serve as temptation
for another is sin, because of course we can't avoid all possibility
of temptation.
There are going to be some men somewhere in the world who
are still sexually tempted when they see a woman in a burqa.
That doesn't mean that all women have to dress like a trash
bag. We're not going to ever go that far, obviously.
We would never argue for that.
But there's a line.
It's a wisdom call.
There's a reasonableness assessment here.
Part of bearing with one another is doing what we can do
within the bounds of reason, not to cause others to fall into
sin. Because that's part of avoiding sin ourselves.
And it's also part of just living a Christian life.
Because yes, part of your goal obviously is to avoid sin yourself,
and so if you have problems with addiction, you need to recognize
that there are biological aspects and psychological aspects and spiritual aspects, and
address all of those.
I know that we haven't necessarily given some exhaustive list of concrete
steps to take, as if that were even possible.
But that's not the point of the episode.
The point is to give the contours of this, to give the
outline of the subject
to help give you at least some tools and some pointers where
to find other tools in dealing with these matters.
And so recognize that if you have an addiction to something, there
may be a biological aspect to it.
That needs to be investigated.
It may be that you need to seek medical attention.
If you are addicted to opiates, you are probably going to need
some drugs drug to help you get off of that addiction.
Because there is a biological aspect.
You are probably going to need to employ some of the psychological
measures we mentioned, and there are others as well.
Because there is a psychological aspect to that addiction.
And you are going to need to address it spiritually as well.
It is something you need to confess.
It is something you need to hear the words that you are
forgiven. I know that there are some in the audience who hate
the idea of someone else pronouncing forgiveness.
They hate the idea of a pastor standing up and saying, I
forgive you in the name of Christ.
Incidentally, you can announce forgiveness to any other Christian just as a
Christian. But that is a very real part of the Christian faith.
It has been a part of the Christian faith from the beginning,
and it is vitally important to hear those words.
There are many times where you need to hear specifically the words
that you are forgiven for your sin.
Maybe it's a particular sin.
Because it is going to take that weight off your conscience.
It is going to be part of what helps you to deal
with that addiction.
That is how you address the spiritual aspect of it.
If you are part of a tradition that does not have that,
then at least go to a Christian brother and ask him to
tell you you're forgiven.
If you're uncomfortable with a pastor saying, I forgive you, then just
go to a Christian brother who will tell you you are forgiven,
because any Christian can, of course, announce that forgiveness, because it's true,
because it was accomplished at the cross, because all sins were forgiven,
in Christ's once and for all time sacrifice.
But you need to be reminded of that.
It's not enough to know, intellectually, that all sins for all time
were forgiven at the cross.
That's the reason that we have absolution, confession, and absolution.
That's the reason that we have the sacrament.
That's the reason that we have baptism.
All of these things are to serve as reminders.
In the case of baptism, of course it also gives you faith,
so it does forgive your sins, but they also have a reminder
aspect to them of reminding you of the fact that you have
this forgiveness of sins.
Even if we don't get into all of the differences that various
groups have with regard to how we conceive of the sacraments, and
of course as Lutherans we conceive of them in a particular way,
and we've gone over that in previous episodes.
That's not the point.
The point is that God has given us many different ways in
which He announces to us and reminds us that our sins are
forgiven. That spiritual aspect cannot be ignored.
It needs to be addressed with regard to addiction and these various
other problems.
But it cannot be done at the expense, it cannot be done
while ignoring the other aspects.
And so if you have problems with addiction, if you struggle with
these issues, you need to make sure that all three of these
things are being addressed.
And part of that is having other Christians in your life who
can help you along with these things?
One of the most common ways of describing the Christian life is
as a marathon.
It's a long distance run.
And I'm saying this is someone who hates running, it's one of
the forms of cardio I do not enjoy whatsoever.
But the Christian life is most often described as a marathon.
It is not something that is done in one day, it is
not something that is done even in a week or a year,
a decade.
It's a very long marathon, incidentally.
Part of being able to run that race successfully is having others
along with you, is having others who are also running that race
who can encourage you.
It is much more difficult to deal with these things when you
are alone.
That is one of the fundamental realities of life.
Scripture speaks to it.
You can think of Adam in the garden, and God says that
it is not good for man to be alone.
Psychology speaks to it.
Isolation is something that is extensively studied and the psychological research, atomization
as well.
And spiritually it's true.
We are not to forsake the gathering together of the saints.
You don't want to run the Christian race alone.
And you should not let your brothers and sisters run it alone,
when you can come alongside them and help them, whether it is
with doubts that they have or struggles with addiction, whatever it happens
to be, when you can offer that aid you should be doing
so. Because that is part of what it means to be a
Christian. On the one hand, we do what we can to avoid
serving as an opportunity or a cause of temptation for others.
And on the other hand, we help those who have fallen into
these things by lifting them up again and serving as encouragement.
The Christian life is meant to be lived in community, not in
isolation. And so that is one of the things that is absolutely
necessary for dealing with issues like addiction.
Do not deal with it alone.
You are not going to get over it on your own.
That is simply the reality of how God made us.
He made us to be social creatures.
Now, sure, there are some cases in which a man, simply through
sheer force of will, gets rid of a particular addiction.
There are undoubtedly many men in history who have done that with
alcoholism. But by and large, most men, most women, are going to
need help from someone.
If it's a drug addiction, you probably need help from a doctor.
Particularly if it's one of the more nasty drugs out there.
If it is something that is psychological, you are probably going to
need help from some of the tools developed by psychology, and yes,
some of them are useful.
You may need the help of someone who is trained in psychology.
There are Christians who specialize in psychology and do so without discounting
the reality of the spiritual, without trying to psychologize everything, simply recognizing
that there are tools in the psychology handbag, in the toolbox, that
can be used to treat certain things.
Again, I mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy.
It has shown great utility in many cases, including with addiction.
And then again there is that third part, the spiritual aspect.
You need to live with and among other Christians.
You need to have other Christians with whom you talk, other Christians
with whom you discuss your struggles and your problems, and, in many
cases, particularly with regard to the things about which we have been
speaking in this episode, you need other Christians who will hold you
accountable. And you probably need to make sure that if you're a
man, they're male, and if you're a woman, they're female.
Men and women do not interact in the same way.
Men and women do not think in the same way.
There are very real differences between men and women, and men are
going to do a better job holding other men accountable, and women
are going to do a better job holding other women accountable.
Now for women it comes with the caveat Don't let it turn
into gossip.
That is one of the sins that is particular to women.
And with men, there's going to be the challenge of actually discussing
the issues whatsoever.
Because by and large, male friendship is something that has just fallen
away in the modern world.
Now there are a number of reasons for that, I don't want
to get into them in this episode at this point.
But it is a problem that needs to be surmounted.
You need to actually have male friends with whom you discuss these
things, and you need to have male friends who are willing to
hold you accountable for various things.
This is one of those cases where perhaps the men who frequent
the gym are going to be more prepared for this in some
ways. Because you probably have a gym buddy who holds you accountable,
or at least someone who's a friend perhaps from childhood or high
school, whatever it happens to be, who asked you when you went
to the gym last what weight you're doing on a particular exercise,
something like that.
He is holding you accountable so that you keep doing the thing
you know you need to do.
The same thing is true of the Christian life.
You need to have other Christians who can hold you accountable, who
can help you to run the race, who can pick you back
up when you fall.
It's not just the case with addiction.
Addiction is sort of the worst case scenario because that's the thing
where you absolutely need the help.
You probably can't get yourself out of the pit without someone throwing
you a rope or a ladder or just something to help you.
But just living the Christian life, even without the worst case scenario,
just running the Christian race, you need others alongside you.
Really what we're doing, what we're attempting to do, and what other
Christians need to do, because this is not something that anyone can
do on his own zone.
We need to rebuild Christian communities.
Because even with regard to those who attend a church who have
been attending it perhaps for many years, know everyone in the church,
you're probably still relatively atomized.
How often do you talk to those at your church outside of
church? When is the last time you had dinner with someone from
your church, or played cards, or went golfing, whatever it happens to
be that you enjoy doing, you need to have a Christian community,
or else it doesn't really mean that much.
Yes, attending church is obviously important, and we are not to forsake
that. That is a vitally important part of the Christian life.
But there is more to the Christian life than an hour on
Sunday, or two hours, or three hours, however long your service and
your Bible study, whatever else happens to be.
This is very similar to one of the things that we mentioned
in so many episodes.
We're talking about the and then what of the Christian life.
Usually we are talking about that with regard to justification because you're
justified, you're saved, you have faith.
Now what?
What do you do?
How do you live the Christian life?
This is similar in that we are talking about Christian community.
You attend church.
Great. And then what?
Do you talk to those people outside of church?
Do you break bread with those people outside of church?
Do you help those people when they need help?
Do they help you when you need help?
If those things don't happen, you don't really have a Christian community.
You just have a bunch of strangers who happen to sit near
each other for an hour every Sunday morning.
That is not a Christian life, that is not a Christian community,
and it isn't a real church.
We need to get away from this view of Christianity as being
an hour here or an hour there, a Wednesday service here, Sunday
morning. That is not the Christian life, and it is insufficient.
It is not the sort of life, it is not the sort
of community that is going to be able to address these very
real problems.
And the way that we start addressing this is simply by rebuilding
those Christian friendships, having someone who will hold you accountable, having someone
with whom you can discuss your sins, and someone who can help
you to overcome those sins.
It is not enough to listen to a podcast.
It is not enough to attend Sunday morning service.
There is more to the Christian life.
There is more that needs to be done by Christians for each
other.
Most of these things have fallen away in the last fifty to
one hundred years.
They've all collapsed because they have not been maintained by previous generations.
We are rebuilding these things that should never have been allowed to
become moribund or just completely absent.
It is going to be hard work.
It will not be easy.
That is simply the reality of it.
But it is necessary.
It is our Christian duty to rebuild these things.
It is our Christian duty to take care of other Christians.
And that includes not just helping
them by not serving as a cause for temptation, not serving as
an occasion for temptation, but also by helping them to overcome those
temptations when they fall into them Whether or not it becomes a
full blown addiction.
The Christian life is a life lived in community, because it is
a life lived for others.
We went over this in the episodes on love.
What is agape?
It is a self-sacrificing love.
It is a love that seeks the good of others.
And as Christians, we do that by seeking the good of our
neighbor. One of the ways we can do that is by helping
our neighbors who have fallen into these sorts of problems, who have
fallen into addiction.
There are many ways we can do that and they are going
to be unique.
At least they are going to be different.
They are going to differ from one man to the next, from
one addiction to the next.
These are issues of wisdom, they're issues of reason.
We can't just give you an outline.
We can't give you a flow chart if this then that.
But we can recommend by pointing you to certain tools, we can
say there are things that are useful in psychology.
We can recommend that you read scripture as we always do, because
scripture contains wisdom, it is going to guide you in many of
these problems.
But we definitely and staunchly recommend that you do not make the
mistake that so many Christians make these days By asking for a
verse for every single thing that anyone ever says.
You are not going to find cognitive behavioral therapy in scripture.
You are not going to find dopaminergic neurons in scripture.
You are not going to find serotonin in scripture.
But these things are very real.
They have utility.
They are part of the reality of creation that God created.
And so we can use them insofar as they are true, insofar
as they are useful, to serve godly ends.
Just because there are atheists involved in the field of psychology does
not mean that not mean the field itself is atheist.
Many evolutionists are involved in the field of biology.
It doesn't change for a second, it doesn't change one iota, that
God is the author of biology.
He spoke all of that into reality.
And so studying those systems is still useful.
The results of those systems, even when studied by atheists, can still
be useful, particularly when used by Christians
And so remember that man is these three parts, and recognize that
all of them are part of the Christian life.
The Christian life is not just the spiritual, the Christian life is
not just the psychological, the Christian life is not just the biological,
and that is in terms of both the good and the bad.
Whether it is things that are good for us that God has
created, that we rightly enjoy, or things where we have fallen into
sin and temptation, where those systems have been hijacked by Satan to
cause harm.
We must approach these issues recognizing the reality of the systems that
are in play, and recognizing the reality of what we need to
do using the wisdom and the reason that God has given us.
That is an actual Christian life.
That is how Christians should actually live.
And that is how we start to address all of these problems
that previous generations have allowed to fester and that Satan has exploited
so effectively.